‘Clickers’ improve test performance, study suggests

Science Daily reports on new research into the impact of ‘clicker’ technology on large post-secondary science courses:

Hand-held electronic devices called clickers are helping college students learn physics, according to a series of research studies.

Ohio State University students who used the devices to answer multiple-choice questions during physics lectures earned final examination scores that were around 10 percent higher – the equivalent of a full-letter grade — than students who didn’t.

The clickers also appear to level the playing field between male and female students. In clicker classes, male and female students performed equally well. In the traditional, non-clicker classes, male students outperformed female students.

To Bill Reay, professor of physics at Ohio State, these results suggest that clickers could potentially encourage more women to pursue STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines.

“The U.S. industrial sector has expressed an urgent need for more scientists and engineers to enter the workforce, to maintain our technological edge in the future,” Reay said. “We need to recruit more students — male and female — who otherwise might not study science. And it turns out that for women especially, clickers can be a valuable learning tool.”